Public and private organizations have access to a vast amount of internal, deep Web and open Web information. Transforming this heterogeneous and distributed information into actionable and insightful information is the key to the emerging new classes of business intelligence and national security applications. Although the role of semantics in search and integration has been often talked about, in this paper we discuss semantic approaches to support analytics on vast amounts of heterogeneous data. In particular, we bring together novel academic research and commercialized Semantic Web technology. The academic research related to semantic association identification is built upon commercial Semantic Web technology for semantic metadata extraction. A prototypical demonstration of this research and technology is presented in the context of an aviation security application of significance to national security.

Semantic Content Organization and Retrieval Engine (SCORE) is among the earliest commercialized Semantic Web technologies. Based on supporting and exploiting domain specific ontologies, it offers advanced capability in heterogeneous content processing analysis, and integration at a higher semantic level-- rather than merely syntactical and structural level approaches based on XML and RDF. These capabilities are now being demonstrated in addressing requirements of very demanding Homeland Security and National Security applications. This paper briefly describes two of them.

The ZEBRA system, which is part of the VisualHarness platform for managing heterogeneous data, supports three types of access to distributed image repositories: keyword based, attribute based, and image content based. A user can assign different weights (relative importance) to each of the three types, and within the last type of access, to each of the image properties. The image based access component (IBAC) supports access based on computable image properties such as those based on spatial domain, frequency domain or statistical and structural analysis. However, it uses a novel black box approach of utilizing a Visual Information Retrieval (VIR) engine to compute corresponding metadata that is then independently managed in a relational database to provide query processing involving image features and information correlation. That is, one overcomes the difficulties in using the feature vectors that are proprietary to a VTR engine, as one does not require any knowledge of the internal representation or format of the image feature used by a VIR engine.